1. Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure is directed to an intercooler system for a piston aircraft engine and a method of optimizing aircraft engine performance.
2. Background
Piston aircraft engines are widely used in light aircraft. Like similar engines in ground transportation systems, piston aircraft engines use cylinder compression as the basis for achieving output power. Unlike engines used in ground transportation systems, engines used in aircraft are subject to rapid temperature changes and extremes that are rarely encountered on the ground. Likewise, aircraft are obviously subject to much higher reliability requirements.
Compression ignition engines, often referred to as diesel engines, typically have no spark ignition device but ignite their fuel in response to a combination of factors including compression, fuel type, fuel concentration/richness, temperature, and air pressure, amongst other factors. It will be appreciated that many of these factors, most particularly air pressure and temperature, will vary during flight.
If manifold pressure and thus cylinder pressure drops too low, there will be power loss, which can limit the desired performance in flight. To improve engine performance under these conditions, turbocharging can be used to increase pressure, but turbocharging uses exhaust gasses to drive the turbine, and when engine power is reduced, such as during descent, there may not be energy to drive the turbo charger to maintain manifold pressure adequate to ensure combustion. Yet reserve power may be critical in descent. Increasing engine power and thus turbocharging would solve that problem. In descent, however, power is not normally increased. Alternatively, one could supply electrical heating to the manifold air on descent, but this solution would require massive batteries and thus negatively affect performance. So these solutions are impractical.
The present disclosure addresses both of these problems with an innovative solution.